Eight

The dark-haired nurse of yesterday takes his temperature, pulse and pressure. She inevitably asks if his memory has returned, pulls a sympathetic face when he tells her not. He resumes his reading of the newspaper.
A white-coated woman with a large chest brings a red chair attached to some scales into the ward. She has ginger hair and a deep mocking voice.
The dark-haired nurse asks him to leave the bed to be weighed and measured. The other day nurses, he realises, are avoiding him. His lack of a name confuses them, upsets their cultivated cheeriness.
The dark-haired nurse holds onto his arm as he crosses to the weighing chair. He leans slightly towards her, feels his feet spreading out upon the cold floor, tests the weight of his body on his legs, notes the movement of his vertebrae as he straightens to be measured, ponders over the placement of his limbs as he lowers himself into the weighing chair... He cannot breathe, cannot swallow, looks down in tilting surprise at the sweat prickling from the backs of his hands. The nurse and the white-coated woman tell him to let go of the chair, and they help him back to bed. The white-coated woman is red and puffing.
Movement has freed his airways. He signifies that he is no longer dependent on their support. They make him lie down. He asks the worried white-coated woman if he might have a copy of his precise statistics — to give to the detective who is trying to find out who he is. The woman writes them on the back of a form. The dark-haired nurse takes his temperature, pulse and pressure.
"Wonder what that was all about?" she lays her cool fingers lightly upon his forehead.
He studies his statistics, watches the white-coated woman push the weighing chair along to the patient who arrived after him yesterday. The patient looks ill, has wrinkled skin the same colour as his teeth, his thin limbs dithering. Under the bedclothes the man flexes his leg muscles, feels their firmness, decides that — compared to the other patients, and despite his momentary faintness — there can be little wrong with him.
He next has to lay aside his newspaper when two nurses come to make his bed. They help him into the red chair beside Mr MacMaster.
"Try doing the quizword," Mr MacMaster tells him, "Be a good test. See if you can remember other things."
Mr MacMaster shows him where the quizword is in the paper. Because of his close scrutiny of every news item he had not yet reached that page.
When the two nurses — unnecessarily, he thinks — help him back into bed, he frowns pensively over the quizword.
When next he has his temperature, pulse and pressure taken, he has only managed to solve those clues which asked him to make a word using a letter, or letters, from four other words. Borrowing a blue biro from Mr MacMaster, he prints, with effort, those solutions
in the squares. He knows the answers to no other clues, abandons the quizword to read the rest of the paper.
He is trying to make sense of the mathematics on the sports page when another white-coated woman parks her trolley beside his bed. This women is skinny with frizzy hair and freckles. On the trolley are bottles and syringes in plastic bags. Obligingly, glad to know what is expected of him, he rolls up his pyjama sleeve, allows the woman to take a blood sample.
Watching her fill out the inevitable form he realises that this day no-one is asking him his name. He hears the woman greet the other new patient by name and, discomfited by the idea of people being kind to him, he returns to puzzling over the day's racing programme.
He is about to start on the front page of The Guardian when a small man in a baggy white suit stops at the end of his bed. He has difficulty putting the brake on a wheelchair.
"X-ray for you old son," he comes around the bed, "Need a hand?"
Unassisted the man climbs out of the bed and walks to the wheelchair. The porter arranges a coffee-coloured cellular blanket around his legs, another blanket around his shoulders. Then, letting off the brake, the small porter begins pushing the wheelchair out of the ward. The dark-haired nurse, in passing, smiles down on him.
They pass the nurses' rooms — a polished desk and black phone in one room, in others large chrome machines, metal cabinets, a steel sink and taps, a tray of upside down white cups...
They enter a long waxed corridor. The porter grunts.
"I don’t think," the man looks up and around at the porter, "there's any need for you to push me. I'm sure I'm quite strong enough to walk."
"Listen John," the porter says, "if nurse says you gotta go in a wheelchair in a wheelchair you gotta go. Right?"
The porter's unsmiling demeanour intimidates him. Wishing he had a more sympathetic companion for this excursion into new territory, he looks into the double doors they pass on either side of the corridor. The wards within are replicas of his own. Women in frilly nighties in one ward, children with bandaged limbs in another.
The wheelchair stops between two sets of grey lift doors. The porter presses a white button. Opposite the lift doors are blue plastic seats, a trough of potted plants and two cylindrical ashtrays. Fixed to the wall is a tall list of ward numbers, arrows beside them. A windowsill is too high to be seen over from the wheelchair: again he beholds a blue sky with today some comma-like wisps of clouds.
The porter jabs impatiently at the lift button.
"Why did you call me John?" the man asks him, "Do you know me?"
"Nah!" the porter laughs. His teeth are yellow and crooked. "Call everyone John. Dunno why. I come from London. Call everyone John down there." He jabs at the button, "Only been here a month."
The wheelchair is pushed into the lift between two white-coated doctors and a young blushing nurse. They all leave at the next floor down; one of the doctors laughing as they round a corner.
The sign outside the lift says the groundfloor. The porter, heaving at the handles of the wheelchair, follows arrowed signs to the X-ray department. Other signs, of initials and abbreviations, point into doors or further on.
The man is aware of the porter labouring behind the wheelchair, occasionally feels his hot moist breath on the back of his neck. They pass a blood bank and a steamy clanging canteen.
On entering the double doors of the X-ray department the porter parks him behind two other wheelchairs. In one is a bald old woman, in the other a long-haired youth with his left leg in plaster.
"You wait here John," the porter says, "They’ll see to you. I'll be back for you later."
On a long settee sit three people in civilian clothes — two youths with walking sticks and a thin woman in fawn skirt and jacket. The two women who appear to be in charge are also in everyday clothes Both are wearing dark blue skirts, one a pale blue cardigan, the other a white blouse. They come and go carrying large cardboard files. The man realises that he is made nervous by civilian clothes: because he doesn't immediately know the wearer's function?
The two wheelchairs before his are pushed through thick doors. The bald woman is dribbling. A few minutes after the doors closed a red light comes on above the doors. A notice says that it is dangerous to enter when the red light is showing. A telephone rings in an office beyond the long settee. All listen to a woman angrily explaining why something wasn't done.
When the youth in plaster and the dribbling woman are wheeled out, their wheelchairs are parked facing the double doors. Large cardboard files are slotted into the backs of the wheelchairs.
One of the walking-stick youths from the settee is escorted into the nearest X-ray room by the woman in the blue cardigan. The woman in the white blouse wheels the man past the thick door. He recognises none of the equipment.
"Can you stand?" the woman stamps on the wheelchair's brake.
"Yes." Trying to appear competent the man divests himself of the two blankets.
The woman leads him over to a metal stand.
"I want you to rest your chin on here," she adjusts a cushioned pad, brings it up to his chin, pushes a metal plate against the back or his head, asks him if it is comfortable, "In a minute I'll ask you to take a deep breath and keep perfectly still." She crosses the tiled room, goes behind a screen.
"Ever had your X-ray taken before?" she asks as she brings the equipment into alignment. She too knows that he has lost his memory.
"Not that I can recall," he says.
"Deep breath now," she tells him. A machine buzzes.
The woman emerges from behind the grey screen to turn his head first to one side, then to the other. Close to she gives off a scent sweetly sour and not unpleasant. She X-rays his chest next from the front, then from the back.
When he is again sat in the wheelchair he hears her shuffling what sounds like metal plates. He thinks of white sliced apples. She slots one of the large cardboard files into the back of his wheelchair, tucks the two light blankets around him and pushes him into the waiting room.
The youth and the bald woman have gone. He recognises yesterday's pale admission to his ward gripping onto the arms of his wheelchair.
"All done John?" the porter emerges from behind the office door, "Back we go."
In the groundfloor corridors are large women with shiny blue aprons, other wheelchairs, a stretcher with a transparent bag suspended above it, walking patients in wraparound dressing gowns.
This time they have the lift to themselves.
"Sister said," the small porter stands to one side to look down at him, "you lost your memory. That right?"
"That’s right." He doesn't like this porter: he talks too close to his face.
"Can't remember nothing?"
"I'm not sure.." The porter's salacious leer is making him nervous.
"Knew this bloke," the lift doors slide apart, "said he drank to forget. If he could've seen you now, he'd have had to come up with somethin' else.."
His bed has been made in his absence. Unassisted he climbs back in, picks up The Guardian from his bedside locker. He is on page two when the dark-haired nurse comes to take his temperature, pulse and blood pressure.

Voice Off. Chance is the one universal law which cannot be formulated.